Haarlem kicks off with Iota

Commissioned by the municipality of Haarlem, ICTU and Xurux developed a Proof of Concept to verify legal documents within public registers via the open source ‘IOTA-Blockchain’

The Xurux and ICTU developed software guarantees the authenticity of legal documents through the open source ‘Blockchain’. In the specific case a citizen can demonstrate to the housing corporation that he or she is an inhabitant of the city of Haarlem by means of Blockchain. The Citizen no longer needs to visit the town hall to receive an official extract.

According to Bas de Boer, innovation manager of the municipality of Haarlem and initiator of the project, the Proof of Concept shows that blockchain or the so called mutual distributed ledger technologies can be implemented in short term. “By figure of speech, the application could be deployed tomorrow. It enhances the technology and its adaptation in the public domain, improving society as a whole.”

Choosing IOTA means that some drawbacks of the Bitcoin blockchain are resolved, such as high energy consumption, transaction costs and relatively slow transaction speed.

The software is released as open source software free for use by governmental and municipal organizations working with public register extracts. The intention is to bring the application in production in 2018. The benefit for the municipality of Haarlem would be 2 FTE that would become available for alternative assignments.

Note: IOTA uses the Tangle, a directed acyclic graph (DAG) for storing transactions and is strictly speaking not a blockchain. Mutual Distributed Ledger would be the correct term.